Raspberry Pi and Startx problem

I recently received a raspberry pi, and got it working no problem. I then put kali on it but it had problems with armitage so I wiped the card and re-installed kali on it this morning. I booted the pi and logged on as root then created a new non-root user I then needed to go back to root as I was trying to install the metasploit framework. I powered the pi down and rebooted and logged on as root. I then launched the GUI with startx. the problem is when I used the startx the GUI did not show up just a single terminal with now icons or even the background. I then typed startx in this terminal and the GUI launched but I can't open anything. Iceweasel for example had an error message- Cannot open Iceweasel because another window is already open. Or something like that. I then tried restarting the pi again, same thing, HELP!